Basket mouth – that’s how a buddy of mine describes Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank – “e done start to leak again o.” It is a moniker appropriated from Fela’s forceful description of uncompromising truth-telling. Mr. Sanusi speaks his mind, form be damned!

Sanya Osha’s new novel, An Underground Colony of Summer Beesbegins with Jerome Akpata moving from Johannesburg to Durban. “He had become tired of having to live looking constantly over his shoulder wondering if someone was coming at him with a gun or a blade.”

In the introductory epigram to this piece, I invoke the Restoration poet Dryden, poet of the Carolingian courts, who knew a thing or two about gluttony under the excess appetites of Charles II of England. “O gluttony, it is to thee we owe our griefs” laments Geoffrey Chaucer. Gluttony and Greed are Siamese twins.

Barrack Hussein Obama was re-elected the president of the United States last Tuesday in a fiercely contested election. He defeated the Republican candidate Mitt Romney by a plurality of votes and by taking 300 of the Electoral College votes. Americans of the political divide between the two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, went into the elections nail-biting; it was too close to call and it could go either way according to the polls. The exit polls had the two candidates polling equally in the battleground states.

If anybody is still in doubt about the reality of global warming, the images coming out of New York this past week ought to put paid to the skepticism. Global warming is real folks, and storms like “Hurricane Sandy,” metrologists now warn us, is the new normal.

Dr. Jacob “Yakubu” Gowon was celebrating his 78th birthday on October 19. Reporters cornered him, and asked him for a comment on Nigeria.

The images posted on-line made me retch; and I have a steely stomach – what Seadogs would call “the liver” – for such things. Food tasted like tar in my mouth for days. Four young men – Lloyd Toku, Ugonna Obuzor, Chidiaka Biringa, and Tekena Erikena – were publicly lynched in Aluu village, near the campus of the University of Port-Harcourt. They were students of the University of Port-Harcourt.

Publication, this past week, of Chinua Achebe’s memoir of Biafra, There Was A Country, had the Awoist camp up in arms. The Awoists – followers and defenders of the legacy of Chief Awolowo- have expended a lot of verbal grapes on the person of Chinua Achebe. It felt like a dangerous mob unleashed on one of the world’s most important cultural icons. All Achebe did was tell the truth about Awo.

Scientists in Japan have distilled a process that can use stem-cells to produce sperms which can be introduced to female eggs to make babies in laboratory conditions. The implication of this heady, mind-blowing development is powerful, dangerous and disturbing.

Chinua Achebe’s much anticipated memoir, ‘There Was A Country’ finally came, hot off the press from Penguin, but one cannot but feel that there is no second door into the book. There is rather a powerful familiarity with the subject of the story and the landscape of action in which that subject exists. If you were Chinua Achebe, already well known and well scrutinized, there would be high expectation for newer, more engaging, more startling detail in a well-storied life.

At best, the Bakassi situation mirrors the extent of the Federal Government of Nigeria’s administrative incompetence even in handling matters of serious strategic relevance to Nigeria’s national security interest; at worse, it reflects the colonial conundrum – the result of the distortions in Africa’s national and cultural boundaries by, particularly, the Berlin conference where the famous “scramble for Africa” was enacted in the nineteenth century.

I returned from Berlin on Wednesday nightwhere I had participated in the International Festival of Literature courtesy of Ulrich Schreiber, and met another delight: the just released copy of Chinua Achebe’s latest book, There Was A Country lying in wait for me.

Some years ago, in the din of the conflict that had marred its promise, I had written a piece titled “the world Igbo confusion” in great frustration about the direction of the American-based World Igbo Congress (WIC). It had structural problems. Its raison d’etre had also become profoundly watered down to the point where the Igbo in the United States began to see no point in the thing.

Imagine yourself on a Nigerian highway, say the interstate stretch between Enugu and Onitsha. The hazards are many, including uneven corrugations and potholes or craters formed from the culture of neglect of public utilities.

This past Thursday, August 16, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida turned 71. He gave thanks to God. Just as the late K.O. Mbadiwe said of himself in 1983 at his official retirement from national politics, he was no longer “K.O,” said the juggernaut, he was then, “O.K;” Ibrahim Babangida is quite OK; he was satisfied with himself, he told reporters at his Hilltop home in Minna, and it was all the doing of Allah.